'The View' host 'disappointed' Jill Biden enabled husband's campaign despite visible cognitive slips
"The View" co-host Sunny Hostin said she was disappointed in former first lady Jill Biden on Friday and doubted that she never saw signs of her husband, former President Joe Biden, declining.
"I'm a little disappointed in the fact that she was living with Joe Biden. She must have seen some of his decline. She must have seen it," Hostin said. "Although she did say, 'I'd never seen him like that, and I haven't seen him like that since.' I can't imagine that the Joe — they've been together so long — I can't imagine that the Joe Biden leading up to that debate, she had not seen him,"
Fellow co-host Joy Behar asked if she thought it was Jill's responsibility to say something to her husband about running for a second term.
"I think she should have privately told him, 'Joe, do you really think you should run again?' Because he promised us that he's going to be a one-term president," Hostin responded.
When asked by CBS News' Rita Braver in an interview set to air in full on Sunday if she had seen signs of Joe declining, Jill Biden said she hadn't.
"No," Biden responded. "He was the same, the essence of the same Joe Biden, but yeah, he was slowing down. He was getting older... It's a very intense job. I think it ages you — quickly."
In the same interview, she said that she worried her husband was having a stroke during the infamous 2024 debate that ultimately led to him dropping out of the race.
"I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never," she told CBS. "I don't know what happened. As I watched it, I thought, 'Oh, my God, he's having a stroke.' And it scared me to death."
JILL BIDEN SAYS SHE THOUGHT JOE WAS HAVING A STROKE DURING HIS DISASTROUS 2024 DEBATE PERFORMANCE
Co-host Sara Haines agreed with Hostin's criticism during the show on Friday.
"When I hear what she's saying there, I can't help but think my first response would be: 'You've served your time. You got the end of this 50 years of service. You were the president for four years. Now let's — you've served enough,'" Haines said.
She argued that if Jill thought Joe might have had a stroke, her immediate reaction should have been, "OK, enough here."
Haines also argued that the Democratic Party should have handled Biden's decline differently, and said, "It was the secrecy and lack of trust, and now we’re being confirmed, ‘No, we weren’t honest.’"
Following the June 2024 presidential debate, several of "The View" co-hosts admitted that it might be time for then-President Biden to exit the race. "I think President Biden needs to step down and be replaced," Haines said.
"I’ve had concerns for a couple of years about Biden’s age. It was stunningly worse than I expected, the performance," Griffin said.
"Maybe he needs to go," Hostin conceded.
After Biden abandoned his re-election bid a few weeks later, co-host Whoopi Goldberg lashed out at Democrats who pressured him to quit the race. "The messaging that we have put out to people over a certain age is horrific. We have basically said, ‘Hey, you know what? We kind of think if you’re over a certain age, you don’t really have what it takes to do the job that you’re doing.’"
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The Bidens appeared on "The View" in May 2025, during which Jill had jumped in to help defend him against the many stories about his declining health.
"They are wrong," the former president said of the stories about his health. "There’s nothing to sustain that, number one. Number two, you know, think of what we left with. We left with a circumstance where we had an insurrection when I started, not since the Civil War. We had a circumstance where we were in a position that we — well, the pandemic, because of the incompetence of the last outfit — end up over a million people dying, a million people dying."
"And we’re also in a situation where we found ourselves unable to deal with a lot of just basic issues, which I won’t go into in the interest of time," Biden continued. "And so we went to work, and we got it done and, you know, one of the things that — well, I’m —"
Then Jill jumped in, addressing co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, "One of the things I think is that the people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us."
"And they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day. I mean, he’d get up, he’d put in a full day, and then at night he would — I’d be in bed, you know, reading my book, and he was still on the phone, reading his briefings. Working with staff. I mean, it was nonstop," she added.